In data storage technology, Small Computer System Interface, or SCSI, is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives, but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and compact disc drives. The SCSI standard defines command sets for specific peripheral device types; the presence of “unknown” as one of these types means it can be used as an interface to almost any device, but the standard is highly pragmatic and addressed toward commercial requirements such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID.
Since the public introduction of SCSI in 1981, there have been no less than seven generations of the parallel SCSI protocol. Each generation doubled the bandwidth of the previous one, primarily by doubling the bus clock frequency. But as the bus frequency was increased with each new generation, so did the negative impact of bus contention, signal degradation, and signal skew, i.e., slight signal delays from one wire trace to the next. After the development of Ultra320 SCSI standard with a bandwidth of 320 MB/s per channel, further bandwidth improvements to parallel SCSI could not occur without developing new and expensive technologies.
Serial Attached SCSI, commonly referred to as SAS, is a relatively recently-developed computer bus used to move data to and from computer storage devices. SAS was later transferred to the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) T10 to become an American National Standards Institute, or ANSI, and International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission, or ISO/IEC, standard. SAS uses on a point-to-point serial protocol that replaces the parallel SCSI bus technology in data centers and workstations. SAS applies the command set from parallel SCSI, frame formats and full duplex communication of Fibre Channel. Also, SAS uses the Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, often abbreviated Serial ATA or simply SATA, interface for compatibility and investment protection. The SAS architecture addresses the parallel SCSI problems of bus contention, clock skew, and signal degradation at higher signaling rates, and can provide performance headroom in enterprise storage applications over SCSI.